France and the Common Market
By DARSIE GILLIE Paris THE French Revolution has left France with a passion for universal ideas and a social system based on a wide distribution of small properties. Frenchmen grow up accustomed to this state of affairs, which produces results very confusing to foreigners. An electorate in which small shopkeepers, artisans, farmer-owners are so numerous, and in which often even an industrial wage-earner may own a small house, can indeed be fired by general ideas, but is apt to find that in practice they conflict with particular interests concerning vast sectors of the electorate. Alter- nately, the particular interests may be confused with the general ideas. Thus the mob of Algiers Frenchmen--small property-owners or (often very similar) small office-holders--can sing with deep conviction the revolutionary 'Chant du Depart: totally oblivious of the fact that the liberty of which this speaks was associated in the minds of those who first sang it at Marat's funeral with equality, whereas they desire above all things to be spared equality with the Moslem majority in Algeria.
This week and last, the French newspaper reader has been offered long reports of the debate in the National Assembly on the Common Market, the project for creating a customs union between France, Italy, Germany and the Benelux after a transitional period of between twelve and seventeen years. It was France, in the postwar years, that took the initiative in promoting schemes for uniting Europe. It is to the honour of M. Guy Mollet that to advance this cause is certainly his greatest ambition. But it was also France that buried EDC with M. Guy Mollet's one-time political ally, M. Mendes-France, acting as sexton after the 'octogenarian chief' M. Edouard Herriot had swung the poll-axe.
On this occasion M. Mollet was asking for a resolution of general approval so as to strengthen the hands of the French negotiators in Brussels. M. Mollet carefully chose his Ministers so as to have as strongly European a government as pos- sible. He refused the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to M. Mendes-France a year ago because he did not believe him to be as profoundly convinced as he is himself that Europe must be 'made' and made now. He was right in his suspicion, for M. Mendes-France has made the most effective criticism of M. Mollet's Common Market, The government spokesmen, he urged, had been less than frank on the most vital issues—tax burdens, social service burdens, agriculture and overseas territories. On none of these had France received satisfaction. Her partners' willingness to allow her temporarily to maintain her system of compensatory taxes and rebates to defend her balance of trade only meant, he argued, that once inside the Common Market she would have to overhaul her financial and social insurance struc- ture so as to be able to compete with her partners. She would also have to devaluate at their bidding. She would in fact lose all autonomy in financial, economic and social policy. The basic fact about her tax structure is that it is designed to please the small property-owner, who is prepared to slave for a relatively small income provided he is his own master and not bothered too much by the tax collector. Hence the importance of French indirect taxes, and her relatively low direct taxes. Structurally related to this is the French system of social insurance o which the State does not contribute (for lack of the revenue it would draw from a higher income tax) and which, therefore, falls very heavily on the employer. Both the indirect taxes and the social insurance (including very big family allowances) swell French costs. A modernised tax system is one of the greatest needs of France, but it is very difficult for an unstable government to carry through the neces- sary reforms, especially with a chronic and grow- ing deficit. There would be no reserve for the period during which revenue from the old sources had ceased to come in and that from the new had not begun to. Similarly, French legislation and administrative practice is designed to keep alive a large number of uneconomic small farms and small shops. The small farmer and the small shopkeeper form powerful sectors of the electorate. Any French planner must desire to reduce their number. Any French politician will tell the planner how desperately difficult it is for any government to stay in power and to do so. M. Mendes-France's speech on the Common Market was, amongst other things, a plea that France should set her financial and economic house in order before going into a customs union. The real but unpublishable answer to that is the enormous difficulty of doing any such thing unless France is placed in a framework which puts irresistible pressure behind the reformers.
M. Mollet has made it clear that the European Customs Union, to his mind, also offers the only solution of France's African problems. She can no longer provide an economic motor of sufficient power to hope to keep her African territories within her orbit unaided. A six-power European Customs Union might have the necessary power of attraction. This idea was greeted with horror when first mooted a few years ago. Now it is being proclaimed as an obvious truth by the parachute general in charge of the maintenance of order in Greater Algiers. But as in the case of France's internal fiscal and social insurance arrangements, so in this, it is doubtful whether French opinion has woken up to the sort of terms on which her European partners would enter into a Eurafrican scheme. The French proposal is that each should contribute to a development fund in proportion to national income. French critics fear that even so she will be left paying for military defence and administrative costs, while her neighbours undersell her on the African market and finally take over political direction. It is, indeed, scarcely likely that other European powers would wish to be involved in the quarrel with Islam that is implicit in France's Algerian policy. For this reason alone they must make political conditions.
That, however, may well have occurred to, and been secretly welcomed by, the advocates of European Union. May it not in fact at last pro- vide an exit from the blind alley in which France finds herself? European Union, said M. Maurice Faure, the Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs in charge of the Brussels negotiations, is the road of salvation, but not the road of facility. It is indeed a road that may have very unpleasant surprises for many Frenchmen, but it is probably the only one that will provide employment and wide perspectives on to the future for the 800,000 French boys and girls that have been added yearly to the population since the war. The increased size of the average French family is in itself a farewell to the society based on a mosaic of small properties. The reforms that the Common Market will impose on France will also be those that the interests of this young generation require. With this large, young generation, France will be able to hold her own in a united Europe however uncomfortable the process of adjustment.
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